The Accidental Successful CIO

I am willing to bet that when you go to the grocery store, the store is  filled with food products. 

In fact, I’m also willing to bet that pretty  much any day of the week or any time of the day that you go to the  grocery store its filled head-to-toe with the food products that you  want to buy. Most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about just  exactly how all of this happens day in and day out. However, the CIOs at  the grocery chains spend most of their day worrying about just exactly how each one of those food products will make it into the store and onto the shelves. 

The good news for them is that technology is starting to be created that will help them to do things like this even better.

The person with the CIO job has a problem on their hands. 

The world has  changed and a new breed of technology has rolled into the IT department:  artificial intelligence (AI).  The entire company is getting excited about the importance of  information technology and the possibilities that AI can bring to the  company: processing of large volumes of data, accurate forecasts, and  improved automation. However, the person in the CIO position knows that they actually have a bit of a problem on their hands: AI systems are only as good as the data that you feed to them. 

It turns out that most of us have a lot of “dirty data”.

So what is the most important asset in the IT department? 

If you are  like most CIOs, you’re instinctive answer to that question is “our people”. That’s a good answer; however, if we were to take a look at how the IT department goes about hiring people,  I think that we’d discover a different story. Does your IT department  spend its time going after candidates with low motivation and skip over  other highly motivated candidates? 

If you want to find the best talent  to fill your IT jobs, then things are going to have to change.

There is no way that any of us could have seen the Covid-19 pandemic  coming our way. 

This is something that none of us have ever experienced  before and in fact the people who taught us how to do our job had never  had to deal with anything like this either. Yes, there are things that  we could have done that would have allowed us to be better prepared, but  there was nothing that we could have done to be completely prepared.  

This is exactly how one CIO now feels…

When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, all of sudden everyone who had been coming into the office started to stay at home. 

That left a lot of workspace wide open.  This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity got the people in the CIO position  thinking. How could the workplace be made better for everyone in the IT  department so that they could share the importance of information  technology? In the past few years a lot of organizations have adopted  the “open office” organizational approach. 

However, is there a better  way to set things up?

CIOs who work in the oil industry are used to seeing ups and downs sweep  through their IT departments. 

However, nothing could have prepared them  for the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. This virus caused everything  to shut down and send all of their workers home. 

Now, after cutting  thousands of jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, oil industry CIOs are  accelerating their embrace of remote drilling and fracking, changes  that will reshape its workforce permanently.

As a CIO, communication is a key part of your job as you try to share the importance of information technology. 

You really need people to pay attention to what you are telling them to do.  However, in this day and age it all too often seems as though the  people that you are talking to are not hearing you. Studies that have  been done have revealed that the people that we are talking to are  tuning out our conversations about 30% of the time. 

How can the person with the CIO job get people to listen to them?

Just by being the person with the CIO job you change things. 

Your  department looks up to you for guidance in how they are supposed to  behave. What a lot of people in the CIO position don’t realize is that  within the IT department, all the way down the line of command, people are watching you.  If you behave well, then they will behave well. If you behave poorly,  then they’ll see it as a green light and they will behave poorly. 

This can all have some very serious consequences.

I’m pretty sure that I don’t have to tell CIOs that they have a real  problem on their hands. 

Due to the way that demographics work, there are  a lot of skilled IT workers who are just about ready to become eligible  to retire. When this happens, all of sudden a great deal of the  knowledge that allows the IT department to run smoothly is going to walk  out the door. When that happens, the CIO has to have a plan to keep the  lights on and the databases up. 

What will you do?

So just exactly what does it take to be a successful CIO? 

I think that  we can all agree that one of the key traits that the person in the CIO  position needs to have is the self-confidence to deal with issues related to the importance of information  technology. If we don’t believe in ourselves, then who will?  Self-confidence is how we make decisive decisions and support and  challenge the members of our team. However, if we have too much  self-confidence, then it can turn into overconfidence.  When we are overconfident then the person with the CIO job can become  arrogant and alienate the members of our team. How can we tell if we  have too much of a good thing? 

Simple – by answering some important questions.